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PHOTOGRAPH BY NICHOLE SOBECKI
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Strength in the past: Today, Sudan is in turmoil after a crumbling revolution and an unpopular coup. But many youth look back toward a time when northern Sudan ruled an empire that stretched to the shores of the Mediterranean. In February’s issue of National Geographic, Kristin Romey writes about the ancient kingdom of Kush—known also as Nubia—and how its little-known legacy has become a rallying cry of Sudanese seeking change. (Pictured above, Nat Geo Explorer Nichole Sobecki shows two Sudanese men: Ahmed Ibrahim Alkhair, at left, with the first flag of independent Sudan, and Awab Osman Aliabdo, with the current flag.)
R.I.P. Isaiah Nengo: As a young archaeologist on his first dig in the mid-1980s, Isaiah Nengo hit paydirt with the first fossil he excavated—a 17-million-year-old ape. In 2014 he led an expedition in Kenya’s Turkana Basin that discovered the most complete fossil skull of an ape ever found. The Nat Geo Explorer, who is featured in the February issue of National Geographic, has died, confirmed the Turkana Basin Institute, where he was associate director. Here, from 2019, is Nengo describing the 2014 discovery at the National Geographic Society’s Explorers Festival.
A pretty penny: A hobbyist out on an infrequent stroll with a metal detector found a nearly 1,000-year-old coin on a farm in southwest England. The estimated worth of the 13th-century gold penny, bearing the likeness of King Henry III, is about $500,000, CNN reports. Henry ruled from 1216 until his death in 1272.
Eighty years ago: 15 people, nine of them with law degrees, met at a pleasant lakeside villa. They ate snacks, drank cognac—and planned the Holocaust. The high-ranking Nazi conference took all of 90 minutes, the New York Times reports. Nine participants of that Jan. 20, 1942 meeting survived the war; only two of them were prosecuted for the horror.
Goodbye, Teddy Roosevelt: After long-running complaints and protests, the American Museum of Natural History removed a controversial statue of the 25th president last week, NPR reports. The statue, which had stood outside the New York museum for 80-some years, showed him on a horse, towering over two walking men, a Native American and an African American. The museum’s website says the design “communicates a racial hierarchy” it found disturbing. Roosevelt’s views on race and support for the eugenics movement have come under wider scrutiny.
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